


Fast Times at Brakebills South

by seekingferret



Category: The Magicians - Lev Grossman
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-04
Updated: 2016-12-04
Packaged: 2018-09-06 12:04:38
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,376
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8750110
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/seekingferret/pseuds/seekingferret
Summary: "Did you win your year?""I sure did," she said. "By a mile."





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [transversely](https://archiveofourown.org/users/transversely/gifts).



It was a known fact of life at Brakebills, and therefore a source of much uninhibited speculation among the younger students, that half of the Fourth Years disappeared at the beginning of the school year and only returned at the end of the semester, thinner and unwilling to speak at all about their mysterious disappearance. Plum Purchas had her own theories, which she asserted were on a much sounder footing than those of her classmates, on account of her magician father having given her some inklings of what to expect. In truth, the only hint he had given her was a cryptic warning over breakfast the summer after her second year at Brakebills, urging her to take her Fourth Year seriously. 

This being hardly worth sharing with the rest of her cohort, Plum had spun a carefully considered tale from the supposed slips her father had made, such as buying her an anklet with an Egyptian ankh charm on it, or seeming to drill her especially hard on Neo-Platonism. The obvious conclusion, at least according to Plum, was that the Fourth Years were dispatched to some archaeological dig in the Greco-Roman region with deep magical implications. The Oracle at Delphi seemed a likely candidate, though at Plum's careful prodding her classmates had come up with a dozen other possibilities that seemed just as plausible. 

Plum wasn't certain if her classmates believed her hints were legitimate clues toward the mystery of the Fourth Years, or if they were merely playing along with her game. There was an air about Plum that made people want to follow her lead, at least at Brakebills. She hadn't had much interaction with people her own age before coming to Brakebills, so she didn't know if this effect were extensible to other circumstances. Plum was usually the person who decided what to do when they had a break from studying, setting the other Illusionists to an impromptu pick-up game of welters, or egging them on to another attempt to trick the Physical Kinds into thinking that the Maze had been rerouted. Some of them would inevitably beg off- Chris Jambel, in particular, seemed reluctant to do anything that had the imprimatur of a Plum Activity on it- but she had a solid crew who would join her nearly every time. Sometimes she could even get some of the Physical Kids to join her. In the years since Quentin had graduated from Brakebills, the mysterious shortage of Physical Kids had ended. With increased numbers had come a weakened group cohesion. The Physical Kids were close, but they were not inseparable. Neither were Plum's Illusionists. Students who participated in Plum Activities did so to have fun, not because they actually liked Plum. Plum was very clear on that.

Speculation about the fate of the disappeared Fourth Years was harmless, or at least as harmless as anything could be at a place like Brakebills. Plum's father was constantly warning her on holidays about how dangerous Brakebills could be, but it was hard for her to take those warnings to heart, especially when she was there, living in the constantly magical moment. A lot of her, er, Muggle-born classmates (though she knew better than to use the term around them) asked her what it was like to grow up as the child of a magician, as they had lived entirely non-magical childhoods, but she'd never had quite the right answer. Her father's magic was an omnipresent part of Plum's childhood, but it belonged to her father, not to her. The magic she did at Brakebills, though it paled in complexity compared to her father's byzantine (or more usually, Late Roman) research projects, was all her own. How could she fail to get excited about it, so excited that she lost sight of the fact that Brakebill was a nexus of dangerous magical energies waiting for someone to step out of line?

The problem was that Chrissy Shah had heard about a new hellenic idol on one of the upper shelves of the Library and managed to convince some of the other Illusionists that it might tell them something about where they were about to go. Not Plum, of course. She hadn't lost sight of the fact that the only reason her classmates thought they were headed to Greece was because of her slightly exaggerated taletelling. But it was precisely because she did not believe in the value of Chrissy's discovery that she had to pretend that she did. If she hadn't acted excited when Chrissy came running into their clubhouse with the news, those who believed her would have started doubting her original story. So instead Plum had taken the lead in planning the expedition to investigate the idol. She led the negotiations with Knowledge to gain access to the restricted parts of the Brakebills Library. She developed their safety protocols for idol handling in reluctant coordination with Chris Jambel. She came up with a part in the plan for everyone who was interested in participating, no matter how unnecessary that part might be. In truth, the planning was so much fun that Plum hardly cared that she knew that any intelligence gathered was unlikely to be meaningful. And in the meantime, she'd once again distracted herself from how dangerous Brakebills could be. 

They executed Plum's plan Friday afternoon once they were done with P.A., giving them the whole weekend to research the idol before anyone was likely to notice it missing. Professor Werbely's lab assignment had been pretty easy, a simple set of variations on Raistlin's Brambling Finger that all of them, except for Chrissy, had mastered in half the allotted time. The only remotely tricky part was that the spell was oddly sensitive to barometric conditions in Iceland. Unfortunately the Weather Underground app did not tend to work very well at Brakebills, but barometric pressure was so frequently an element of Conditions that there were five or six different techniques, all easy enough for a Second Year to execute, that enabled a magician to determine the air pressure in almost any location on Earth. 

After P.A., the four of them walked over to the Library. By prior arrangement with Knowledge, the second floor of the Library was completely deserted, though to be entirely fair it was not much of an ask to empty the library at least of students on a Friday evening early in the semester. Much trickier was keeping professors out of the deep stacks, but by a variety of ruses Plum knew nothing about, it had been somehow managed. In exchange, the Illusionists in her year would surrender their allotted wine to Knowledge for a week. This was a hardship, but an endurable one.

The Brakebills Library was of course a place where Plum, like all Brakebills students, had spent a lot of time. Brakebills students were, at their essence, nerds. They liked books, they liked being surrounded by books, and their coursework required a good deal of research technique to get through. But since Plum's Discipline was not in the Knowledge Domain, she had never been initiated into the Library's most inscrutable secrets. Brakebills' card catalogue's classification system- which had never been replaced with an electronic cataloguing system, for obvious reasons- was not based on the Dewey system, or the Library of Congress system, or Colon, or Bliss, or UDC, or any classification system that a mundane librarian would have ever heard of. Students were drilled on the basics of the Brakebills system by a bored library clerk on their second or third day of classes, enough to get around the most commonly used areas of the library. For more esoteric requests, it was usually faster to ask a librarian to track down the book for you. 

They fanned out hunting for the idol. They kept in contact by means of a charm Plum had placed on each of their ears that served as a magical walkie-talkie. It had emerged that Chrissy had only the faintest idea of where in the library the damned thing was located. Plum should have been angry at her, but the additional challenge just increased the fun. Improvising in response to changing conditions was exactly what made capers fun.

They hunted for about twenty minutes, passing lazy wisecracks back and forth on the party line and pointing out book titles with apparent double entendres in their title, like Neo-Phrenology: Giving Head Shapes New Meaning. Then, from deep in the Sylvan Magic section came a sustained, hoarse scream. Plum's heart jumped almost out of her chest as she raced over to see what had happened. She nearly ran into Mattie Herschel, running toward the shelves from the opposite direction. They righted themselves and took off toward the noise, which was continuing, but growing quieter. 

Beneath a copse of shelves with journal studies on fungal DNA research, they found Chris Jambel, collapsed prone on the tile floor. There was a giant hole open in the back of his head. A few feet away, a silvery idol was stained deep red with Chris's blood. Chris's screams, muffled by the floor, were growing softer. Plum tried calm herself. She tried to run through the contingency plans she had developed with Chris, but either they hadn't covered this scenario or in the panic she'd blanked out. She felt very clearly that she was in over her head. She turned to Mattie and Chrissy, staring at her in horror from the other side of Chris's body, and in as insistent a voice as she could muster said, "Chrissy, run down to the first floor and get help from the librarian. I'll stay with the body... I mean with Chris."

She stayed there, trying to keep Chris's brains from falling out of his head with a torn strip of her shirt, while she waited for the adults to come to clean up her mess. That was how it felt to Plum, like she had proven once and for all that she was not yet an adult. The head librarian arrived, along with several of the Healing professors, and then Dean Fogg showed up to order her back to her room, with dire promises that he would speak to her in the morning. She walked straight back to her room, in a daze. She never even saw what happened to the bloody idol. She took a blurry shower and then collapsed in bed. The last thought in her mind when she fell asleep was an inchoate dread of her appointment with Dean Fogg, a dread so deep it even overwhelmed her worry about Chris.

But in the morning, there was no meeting with the dean. She was chivvied out of bed at 7AM sharp by Professor Van de Weghe and instructed to follow her up a staircase she'd never noticed before to the roof of the House. On the roof, she found eight other Fourth Years waiting in the chill September air. After about ten minutes of waiting, Professor Van de Weghe returned to the roof with another student. Plum was relieved to find that their tenth was Chris, his head wrapped in a bloodstained bandage, his eyes glassy and vacant. 

Plum took a look around the roof and sized up the rest of the group. Mattie Herschel was the only other Illusionist up there. Apparently Chrissy Shah and Li Na would be staying at Brakebills for the time being. Of the rest, there were Steven Chan and John Davies from the Physical kids, Eleanor Melkofsky from the Knowledge Discipline, and four Naturals that nobody ever bothered to distinguish from each other. Plum was full of questions, but nobody else was talking and so she didn't say anything to any of them.

"Everyone take off your pajamas," Professor Van de Weghe called out. She sounded bored, like this was a thing she said all the time, like asking a bunch of teenagers to strip in front of her was so routine that even the possibility that one might be tittilated by it didn't exist. Plum took her clothing off and dropped them at her feet. The rest of her classmates did likewise. It was a warm night for September, but at midnight there was a chill in the air. Plum shivered.

Chris was having difficulty getting his shirt over his head without touching his bandages. Professor Van de Weghe walked over to help him, and after finessing the shirt off his head and dropping it casually to the ground, she removed the bandage from his head, taking care not to put any pressure on the wound. Plum could see that the wound had been stitched up, and the healing magically accelerated, but it still looked horribly gruesome. She felt sick, and responsible.

Professor Van de Weghe walked down the line, throwing some white goop onto each student's shoulders and forehead. It was chilly to the touch, but Plum steeled herself and didn't move as the professor applied it. After rechecking her work, the professor spoke a single command word. Instantly, painfully, Plum's body started shifting, transforming. Her bones merged and split, her muscles twisted and then reformed, her stomachache amplified and then faded, and then she and all of her classmates were geese.

"Honk" she said. Professor Van de Weghe, now the only human on the roof, picked up her body and flung it off the roof. Instinctively, she flew, beating her wings and following the path her body knew to take. 

She flew south with her compatriots, an ad hoc vee of tireless fliers, thinking of nothing but flying and feeding and shitting, until, exhausted, she set down on the roof of a House in the snow. A man spoke a single command word and she was human once more, naked in the freezing cold snow. Welcome to Brakebills South.

After some banal and only mildly vicious introductory remarks from Professor Mayakovsky, Plum and her classmates were separated and introduced to the small prison-cell-like rooms where they would spend the bulk of the next semester, grinding through tedious magical exercises in a way that Mayakovsky assured them would turn some but not all of them into real magicians. Plum would have sneered at this assurance if the flight south hadn't thoroughly broken her already. Oh, and to make matters worse, Mayakovsky had magically removed their ability to speak to each other. 

The biggest difference between studying at Brakebills and studying at Brakebills South, for Plum, was the isolation from benchmarks. She always knew in her classwork at Brakebills whether she was the first to master a spell or the second (never the last). That was how she measured herself and her progress- not against herself, but against her classmates. Did that limit her development? Did she unconsciously hold herself back by only striving to do better than her classmates, rather than trying to do her absolute best? This might have been a good subject for introspection, but despite the isolation, Brakebills South was not a good place for introspection. It was too busy. She was too busy, remaking herself in Mayakovsky's image. 

She had fucked up in the Library and she knew it and she was punishing herself. She worked her way through Legrand in all of its Circumstances. She got to the end faster than any of her classmates, she imagined, but she had no way of knowing. She wanted to ask Mayakovsky how she'd done, but she couldn't talk. He wouldn't tell her anyway, she knew. When he came into her cell to give her the next assignment, he slapped her across the face. Hard. Then he slapped her again.

"The first one was for being a smart ass. The second slap was just because I don't like you." She felt fear, she felt powerless, but she no longer felt guilty for what had happened to Chris. It wasn't her fault. How could it be her fault? She was worthless. Nobody should have trusted her with magic to begin with. She had to start over. Mayakovsky handed her Bujold's Sorcerous Nail Extraction and she knew she was supposed to feel despair that all of the work she'd put into Legrand would be reversed, but instead she felt hope. Here was a formula, being handed to her. Here was a lifeline. She went through all of the Circumstances of Bujold, removing the nails from the board, and then she performed a minor mending spell she knew and removed all the holes she'd put in the block of wood. And then, before Mayakovsky returned to give her the next assignment, she redid all of the Circumstances of Legrand and Bujold. Back at Brakebills she would have done the same thing to show off to her classmates, as an act of machismo. There was nobody here to show off to. She just needed the extra practice.

After weeks of this- weeks of doing everything Mayakovsky asked of her, and then secretly going further, Plum wasn't just a magician. She was magic. It was in her, she was in it, the difference no longer pertained. Was this the secret of Brakebills South? If she thought about her speculations back at Brakebills, about the archaeological dig she'd imagined or convinced others that she'd imagined, she might have laughed, except there was no laughter at Brakebills South. Her fellow students, who she saw silently at mealtimes, were vanishing into various forms of bleakness and despair and emptiness. She imagined that when they saw her, they saw the same thing in her eyes, that they couldn't detect the invisible hope that was buoying her: that Brakebills South was healing her. Perhaps they had their own invisible hopes; it was hard to tell. Perhaps even Mayakovsky had his invisible hopes, but she thought very little about this. She thought very little about anything but Circumstances, the raw technical ability to feel magic in her bones. There was no benchmark but her own failures.

After a time- she wasn't sure how long- the routine began to vary. She continued with her Circumstances, but Mayakovsky seemed to know when that was no longer enough to push her on its own. The magic became harder, more physical, more demanding of her intellect and her concentration- more dangerous. She didn't feel the danger directly, only intuited it by the change in the way tasks were presented to her, which vexed her. It was the same problem she'd ignored back at Brakebills. Magic was both dangerous and hard, and she only cared that it was hard. When was she going to grow up? When was she going to learn to think about others besides herself? Mayakovsky was a brilliant magician and a great teacher, but he had not taught her empathy or caution. All he had shown her was how to push herself harder. She kept pushing, and pushing, and pushing. 

After more time passed, Mayakovsky told them all at breakfast that it was time to think about their final exam: walking from Brakebills South to the South Pole, about five hundred miles of the most unliveable environment on Earth's surface. It was a race- the first student to reach the South Pole was the winner. For the first time all semester, Plum would be able to compare her progress to her other classmates. She knew that Brakebills South had hardened her, sharpened her, made her better, but maybe also meaner. Plum wanted to win, more than anything she'd ever wanted in her whole life. Maybe it was a little of her mother's Microsoft competitiveness. She was going to win. There was no way she was going to let Steven Chan or one of the Naturals beat her.

Brakebills South was identical to Brakebills, which meant its library was identical to the library at Brakebills. Plum buckled down, and spent every moment she wasn't doing the last of Mayakovsky's endless Circumstances in the library, studying for the final. She finally figured out the details of the Brakebills library's classification system. It wasn't that complicated, once you'd acquired the intellectual discipline required to perform the magic she'd done in the past month. She spent a morning trying to figure out if there was anything better than Chkhartishvili's Enveloping Warmth. There was, buried in a Siberian magic book composed by a transportee eighty years ago, and though she would have found it impossible to perform two months ago, it now seemed like a straightforward, though very obscure spell. And in addition to being warmer and more stable than Chkhartishvili's, it didn't require any mutton fat to perform. She practiced Chkhartishvili's like a fiend anyway, in case her newly discovered Siberian spell failed her, but she had no plan to acquire mutton fat and no time to experiment to devise a variation on the spell that didn't require it. 

Between the Siberian warmth spell and some other utility spells for surviving long periods without food and water and so on, she felt she was pretty good on making it to the South Pole without dying. But she didn't want to just make it there, she wanted to win. That meant that once she'd come up with a plan for getting there, she had to work on getting there faster. She wasn't allowed to fly or turn into a fast moving animal, and she wasn't allowed to summon a vehicle: she had to walk. Still, there had to be loopholes she could find in Mayakovsky's rules. There were always loopholes, and Plum was good at finding them. The Brakebills South library was her ally. It was amazing what you could find, when you understood how it worked. She found spells that would wind her legs like the Roadrunner from those old cartoons, but they were useless on the icy terrain. She'd just windmill endlessly without moving forward, without any traction. She got interested briefly in rocketry, turning herself into a rocket hurtling toward the South Pole, but even she couldn't find a way to do it safely.

Eventually she concluded that she and everyone else she was up against was going to be using more or less the same speed and strength enhancing spells. They were all going to be moving faster than normal, but not faster than each other. The trick wasn't going to be who could move faster. It was going to be who could sustain it longer without having to break for sleep.

It wasn't safe to go without sleep for the whole trip. The spells she was going to be casting on herself drew on her energy, and without any possibility of food on the way, she needed to sleep to replenish her supply of energy. But perhaps she could keep moving while she was sleeping? Perhaps she could find a way to supercharge her sleep so she didn't need as much to restore herself? All of these things seemed possible. She evaluated all of the possibilities with a ruthless discrimination and found the plan that would require the least sleep without endangering herself.

When the test came, she was ready. Mayakovsky saw her off with a brusque good luck and a bag of mutton fat that she dumped on the ground to save weight, and then she was off. She was a walking, talking South Pole homing machine. She was running more spells at once than she'd ever done before, and it tested her like nothing had ever tested her before, but she never felt a single moment of doubt. Those other students, they were walking in her dust, she knew, even though their departure times had been staggered to prevent collaboration and so in reality her certainty that she was leading was just as suppositious as her conviction that she'd been beating them all semester. But every step of the way she was bounding forward with superhuman power, and every night she barely slept she was gaining on her classmates. She was certain of that, she was certain that she was the best, and everyone else deserved to lose. 

She didn't have time to think about her classmates. She was focused on keeping up the spells that were keeping her alive, a fine razor balance between sanity and destruction. But some part of her was thinking about her classmates, anyway. She wondered about Chris, whose head had nearly healed over his time at Brakebills South, and who had been her closest competition among the Illusionists before the semester started. She wondered about Eleanor, who'd spent as much time in the Brakebills South library as she had, and Steven Tran, the best of the Physical kids, who might have an edge since so much of the magic needed to keep them alive was physical magic. She hadn't seen them in days. She hadn't seen anyone out here at all. All that was in front of her was the snow and the empty gray sky and her dim awareness that the South Pole was that way. How was her competition doing? For that matter, how was she doing? The part of her mind that was busy winning the race was only dimly aware that she was even entertaining these thoughts. 

On the seventh or eighth night- she'd had a clever plan to keep track of the days using magic, but it had stopped working on day five and she'd decided against wasting the energy debugging the spell- she started hallucinating a traveling companion who looked an awful lot like Bill Gates. Billy mostly just walked beside her, keeping pace in spite of the electrifyingly fast pace she was setting, but occasionally he would offer her a word of half-assed advice, like "If you can't make it good, at least make it look good." Plum was such a nexus of high energy magic that there was the remote possibility that she'd actually astrally projected Bill Gates onto her shoulder, but determining whether he was a hallucination or a violation of an important international magical use treaty could wait until she won the race. 

And then she was within a few hundred feet of the South Pole and she sighted a man standing there, waiting for her. "Congratulations," Professor Mayakovsky said. "You are first, if that matters to you." It did matter to her. He muttered a single unintelligible word and suddenly Plum was no longer in the Antarctic, but back where she had started, at the House. At Brakebills. Where she belonged. 

When she returned to Brakebills, she was intercepted by Dean Fogg, who congratulated her on her victory but gently reminded her that they had unfinished business to deal with. Plum had no idea what he was talking about, but followed him to his office. She was staggered and discombobulated by her reacclimation to warmer climes. When they entered the Dean's office, the door closed behind her and Dean Fogg began to talk about a Grecian idol and abruptly Plum remembered that before she'd been turned into a goose by Professor Van de Weghe, she was about to get in serious trouble with the Dean for her escapade in the library. 

Some small part of her had convinced herself that being sent to to Brakebills South meant she had been forgiven her role in affair, but mostly she'd just completely forgotten. Mayakovsky's exercises had become her life for the past months- she still had no idea exactly how long it had been, but she assumed it was months. Nothing from her life before Brakebills South had mattered. Even now, some part of her brain was itching for the brutal routine. But no, she was back in the real world- or as much as Brakebills could be called the real world- and apparently Dean Fogg still expected her to deal with the consequences of her actions.

Plum could barely remember why they had gone into the library. What kind of foolish person had she been back then? She felt so much more mature, so much wiser than the idiot who'd planned a library heist of a potentially dangerous magical object in order to test a theory she'd already known to be false. There were so much more important things in the world of magic. 

"Professor Mayakovsky kept a close eye on Jambel and he does not believe that he was possessed by the spirit of Hera, fortunately..." Dean Fogg was explaining. Apparently that was why they had been sent to Brakebills South in spite of the incident: to segregate the two of them from the student body, and allow the incredibly powerful Mayakovsky to observe their recovery for signs of magical contamination. It made sense, though Plum felt a sense of outrage that they had not explained any of this to her before shipping her off tens of thousands of miles. They had treated her like she was a child! She felt the infantilizing cradle of Brakebills wrap around her once more, and after a moment of indecision decided to embrace it. Dean Fogg would punish her and she would endure it and then she would move on and everything would be right in the world once more. She was back at Brakebills again. After this meeting she could go navigate the Maze again, or get drunk on stolen wine and coax her classmates into singing Brakebills anthems offkey.

Punishment at Brakebills was usually fairly half-assed. There was none of the Harry Potter high school bullshit: no detentions or writing lines or demerit systems at Brakebills. At times Plum, who'd been homeschooled and had therefore missed the rigmarole and ceremony of public secondary education, had longed for a ritualized disciplinary system, Brakebills-style, but this was not a very serious longing. In practice, there were two punishments that were exercised at Brakebills for misbehavior outside of the classroom. For crimes not severe enough to merit expulsion from Brakebills, Dean Fogg or one of his delegated representatives would yell at the sinning student for as long as they felt necessary. For everything else there was expulsion. Plum had endured tonguelashings from virtually every member of the Brakebills faculty and had considered herself something of a connoisseur. As to expulsion, she hardly thought it likely in this circumstance, given that they had chosen to send her off to Brakebills South rather than confront her directly anon. Had they wanted to expel her, they wouldn't have wasted her time subjecting her to the exquisite torments of Professor Mayakovsky.

Still, experienced or not, Plum was taken aback at the ferocity of Dean Fogg's dressing down. He let loose at her, working his way up and down the alphabet and back and forth between black and blue. She had acted irresponsibly, she had acted inconsiderately, she had betrayed the trust both of her fellow students and of her professors. This was the gist, but it took him an hour to communicate it to her with his desired degree of precision. Plum was shocked, not least because she'd never heard Dean Fogg use a single curse word before, let along strings of ten or fifteen of them. He didn't seem like the type, or perhaps Plum just didn't know what the type was. It turned out that the Dean had a masterful command of the most vulgar subsections of the English language, and he assaulted her with his gift with the same exactitude that he might pay in delivering a lecture on the importance of ring finger positioning in a particular Popper exercise. The Dean was somehow fussy in the way he swore. Fussy, but not prissy. He did not sound like someone who had no business swearing, but rather like someone relishing every iota of nuance in the scolding he was delivering. He sounded like someone who might be able to provide a detailed precis on the etymology of any word in his scatological parade.

The hour passed and Plum, having endured, limped out of the room and back to her bedroom. That night, Plum dreamed of a magic eight ball, a toy whose 'magic' was so banal it had been a childhood joke with her father. She asked it whether Brakebills South had actually changed her. It took a long time for the toy to finally say "Reply hazy try again". Plum resigned herself to not knowing.

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks to M for beta!


End file.
